AI The second stone caught her hip and tried to turn her sideways.
Aurora shoved through the narrow gap before it could pin her, coat snagging on rough bark that felt more like knuckles than wood. The silver chain at her throat tugged as if caught by invisible fingers, then snapped free with a metallic click. She stumbled three steps into the clearing and only then realised the park had stopped behind her like a door slamming shut.
No traffic. No distant shouts from late trains or bars. Just her breath, too loud, and the tiny, traitorous pulse of heat against her breastbone.
She cupped the pendant through her T-shirt. The little crimson stone throbbed like a heartbeat that did not match her own.
"Right," she said, because the word steadied her mouth if not her hands. "You wanted me here. Congratulations. You got me."
The Grove did not answer. It listened.
She let her eyes adjust instead of snatching her phone out at once. Shapes gathered themselves out of the dark, not in any kind of hurry. A ring of towering oaks loomed around the clearing, their trunks so thick three people would struggle to encircle one. Wildflowers crowded the ground in fat, careless bunches, petal colours gone to ash in the weak light. No undergrowth crackled underfoot. The place waited like a held breath.
Her phone showed 00:03 when she checked the time. Battery at seventy per cent. Signal bar empty.
She already knew that last part, but she checked anyway. Some habits bent but never broke.
She slid the phone back into her pocket and touched the pendant again. Whoever left it for her had not signed their name, only a cheap printer-paper note tucked beneath her door that morning, all block capitals and no punctuation.
BRING THE STONE TO RICHMOND PARK TONIGHT
THE GROVE IS OPEN
YOU WILL GET ANSWERS
After London, after Evan, after the dream that replayed every night with different exits and the same ending, she should have torn the note in half and set fire to it. Instead she stood in a secret ring of oaks and wildflowers in the dead middle of Richmond Park with a stolen Fae bauble at her throat, waiting for a stranger.
Her mother would have asked if she had lost her mind. Her father would have asked which law this broke.
Eva would have asked why she left the house alone.
Aurora shifted her weight from one boot to the other and forced her shoulders to drop from around her ears.
"Ten minutes," she said into the trees . "You get ten, then I'm out. I have work in the morning."
Something clicked softly behind her.
She turned too fast. Neck muscles pulled and the world lurched , then steadied. The stones that marked the Grove's edge loomed where she had just pushed through, twelve warped oaks grown so close their trunks had fused in places into bulging ribs and knotted faces. Gaps between them glowed with nothing at all, blacker than the rest of the park.
Nothing moved among them. Not a fox. Not a human. Not the wind.
The click came again, to her left this time.
She held her breath and listened.
Another click, like someone tapping a fingernail against glass, rhythm too regular to be random. Three taps, pause, two taps, pause, three again. It sounded close, but distance meant nothing in the Grove. Sound folded in on itself here. She had learnt that the first time she followed Eva in and spent what felt like an hour looking for her friend, only to find her standing six feet away laughing, as if Aurora had somehow walked in circles around her.
Aurora frowned and forced herself not to chase the noise.
"You're not ten yet," she murmured. "You can wait your turn."
She stepped towards the centre of the clearing instead. Each stride felt half-swallowed, ground springy underfoot like thick carpet or moss-wrapped bone. Flowers brushed her shins. Some melted under her soles with a wet, bruised-green smell.
When she reached the centre, the heat from the pendant flared.
She stopped at once and dragged it out of her shirt. The chain slid cool across her skin, but the stone lay in her palm like a coal. In the faint light it did not look like a gemstone at all. Something inside it writhed slowly , a thick, dark pulse behind the crimson.
"That can't be good," she said.
She glanced over her shoulder.
The oaks stood where she had left them. The gaps between their trunks still showed nothing. Which made sense. The note had not mentioned a crowd.
It also had not mentioned the cold.
She frowned and rubbed her arms. Her breath did not mist and her fingers still bent, so no danger of frostbite yet, but a clinging chill wrapped her ribs. Winter in Cardiff felt wet and honest and cut straight through you. This cold slid in without weight , more idea than air. It made the hairs on the back of her neck lift.
The click against glass shifted into a quiet scrape.
Aurora's head snapped towards it.
From the corner of her eye she saw something move between two far trunks, long and pale, as if someone dragged a sheet along the ground. When she looked straight at it, the gap held only darkness.
She rolled her jaw.
"Fox," she said under her breath. "Or some very committed Morris dancers."
The scrape came again, this time behind her. Closer.
"Not funny," she muttered.
Her hand tightened around the pendant until the edges bit flesh. Heat curled through her fingers, pain sharp enough to feel clean. She drew a steady breath through her nose, then another.
Copper stung.
It caught her like a memory, that specific tang. Back alley behind Silas's bar, Eva holding a flannel to the gash in her brow with hands that shook, saying nothing. Blood. Fresh.
Aurora opened her mouth and tasted metal. She checked her palm.
No cut. No blood. Just the faint half-moon marks of the stone pressed into skin.
The Grove thickened around her.
Not the trees themselves, those remained where they were, but everything between them seemed to draw close . The air, the distance, the shadow. She could have sworn she now stood in a smaller space than when she arrived, as if the oaks had shuffled while her back turned.
The pendant pulsed again.
The warmth no longer felt comforting . It beat like a countdown.
Her phone dug into her thigh with a dull rectangle of pressure. She almost left it in her pocket, then thought of the way time slipped sideways in the Grove and tugged it out anyway.
00:03.
She stared.
She had walked from the stones, argued with herself, counted clicks, smelt imaginary blood. Time could not still read three minutes past midnight.
She looked away, counted to thirty under her breath, then checked again.
00:03.
The numbers glared up from the screen, stubborn and unchanged.
She turned the phone off, then on. Same time. Same frozen digits. The battery still sat at seventy per cent.
It took effort to swallow.
"Fine," she said softly . "We play your game."
She locked the screen and slid the useless slab back into her pocket.
The scrape behind her stopped.
The silence that followed felt thicker than any sound.
Aurora lifted her head. Her ears strained. She heard her heart, the faint wheeze in her lungs left from teenage asthma, the distant sigh of leaves against leaves above her. Nothing else.
No. Not quite nothing.
Someone whispered her name.
"Rory."
The voice came from the treeline to her right, low and conversational, as if the speaker sat at the end of Silas's bar and called for another drink. Male. Warm. Rich Cardiff vowels softened by years in London.
Every muscle in her body flinched.
She turned slowly . If she moved fast she might run without thinking. If she ran, she risked hitting a tree that had not stood there a moment before, or worse, slipping between those trunks and never quite making it back out.
The shadows between the oaks at her right held. The ground lay smooth. The flowers bowed their heads. Nothing stood there. No man, no fox, no Fae.
Her chest tightened.
"Original," she said into the emptiness. "Haunt me with my ex. Very creative."
The pendant burned hotter.
Evan's voice came again, closer now, as if he had taken three unhurried steps toward her.
"Rory. That you, cariad?"
The old pet name slotted into her ears like a key.
She swallowed hard.
He sounded perfect . Lazy and amused and five whiskies in. No echo , no hollow ring, no ethereal tremor. She could have turned and found him leaning against the bar door, jacket open, that crooked almost-charming half smile he used to wear even when his hand tightened on her wrist.
Her left hand brushed her own wrist now. The scar there, small crescent of puckered skin from a childhood fall, ridged under her thumb.
Aurora drew a breath that scraped.
"You're late," she said. "Took you months to find me in London. Starting to lose your touch."
He laughed.
The sound came from the opposite side this time. Her left. Much nearer. As if he stood just outside her field of vision, shoulder nearly touching hers.
"Still mouth on you," he said. "Still run when things get hard."
The pendant seared her sternum. She clenched her jaw until her teeth ached.
"You are not here," she said. "I walked into the Grove alone. No one followed. You are not here."
Leaves shifted ahead. Not wind. Wind made sense. This moved like something dragged its fingers along every branch in reach.
Her throat tightened. She kept her eyes on the ground and spoke anyway.
"If this is some Fae glamour," she said, "you got his voice wrong. He never sounded that calm."
Silence fell so fast the last echo of her words died mid-breath.
Her own voice came back at her from the dark.
"Got his voice wrong," it repeated. "Wrong. Wrong."
She flinched.
That, at least, did not sound like Evan. That sounded like a tape played backwards and slowed, vowels stretched to breaking. Her heart hammered.
The pendant flared again. Light, faint but real this time, bled through her fingers. A dull, inner crimson that stained her palm and the front of her shirt like thin smoke.
She lifted it higher.
The Grove reacted.
Not visibly, not in any way a camera could catch, but the air jerked . The hairs on her arms stood straight. Something huge and patient shifted just beyond the ring of trees, like a sleeper turning in its bed.
The warmth in the stone did not beat in time with her heart any more. It marched to its own rhythm. Two fast pulses, one slow. Two fast, one slow.
Her ribs ached in time with it.
Something moved at the very edge of her vision, tall and thin and wrong in its angles. It watched her from between two trunks, then slid away the instant she tried to focus on it. Whatever it was did not rustle leaves or crunch flowers. It left no sound at all. That absence hurt more than footsteps would have done.
Aurora's mouth had gone dry.
"Show yourself," she said. The words came out rough. "You dragged me out here, you talk like him, you talk like me. Stop hiding."
Nothing answered.
Instead the smell of copper rolled in harder, thick and undeniable. It wrapped her tongue. Her stomach turned. She scanned the flowers, half ready to see crimson soaking their white and purple heads, but they remained pale and intact.
The scent grew until she almost gagged.
She took one involuntary step backwards.
Her heel struck something solid that had not stood there a heartbeat before.
Cold ran up her spine like ice water.
The shape behind her did not feel like tree bark. Tree bark had give, texture, life. This pressed into her boot like stone or compacted earth. Wider than a trunk, too. She tried to tell herself she had backed into a root. A rock. Anything that matched the park she knew beyond the stones.
A breath stirred the loose strands of hair at the nape of her neck.
Not wind. Not imagined. Moist and steady and close.
The voice behind her ear spoke in a tone that was not Evan's, or her own, or any human's at all. It scraped and whispered at once, like a song dragged across gravel.
"Aurora Carter," it said. "Found you."
The Heartstone in her palm erupted into blinding crimson light.